Ten minutes of contemplative first person exploration accompanied by a lovely guitar and string piece. These ten minutes represent only ten seconds of in-world time, denoted by the barely discernable movement of leaves, banners flapping in slow motion, flames flickering in the distance. Before too long the game introduces a diegetic reason for the finite time limit, leaving you to prioritize the targets of your unfinished wandering if you so choose.

The original Ludum Dare prototype was an impressive implementation of its concept for the short time frame, but I appreciate the extra content in this post-competition version, which fills the desert landscape with more landmarks and dynamic reminders of your time-dilated state.

There is no jump button, so until the developers smooth out the landscape or slope handling be wary of small pits in the landscape or you might spend half the game stuck in a ditch.

Reading mystery novels as a kid, at some point you have to acknowledge that there’s no possible way you would have solved the case because the detective in the story has so much more life experience than you. (Studying Ellen Raskin in primary school I learned that “bookie” isn’t an endearing term for a lover of fiction and that my initial understanding of The Westing Game was waaaay off.)

There’s a deliberate knowledge gap between young Bell Park and the adult suspects, who are mostly amusing caricatures of personalities in the tech sphere, unafraid to talk above our heroine’s head. This forces the player to make accusations and judgment calls without fully understanding how this world works. A true youth detective.

I see a lot of the creative process in the narrative beats: trying to tailor a story to one’s audience, throwing away countless drafts, trying the exact opposite of what’s commonly accepted just to see what happens.

Enough Plumbers 2, like the original prototype Enough Marios, is a puzzle platformer where whenever you collect a coin, that coin is shortly replaced by another player character, controlled simultaneously alongside every other plumber in the level. Individual plumbers can collect Mario-esque powerups, differentiating them with new abilities to traverse or deform the level.

The level design makes good use of this absurd premise. Plumbers are disposable. Sometimes you’re given more than enough plumbers to complete a level, additional ones used as fallbacks if the one you’re tracking dies. Other times the game asks you to choreograph an intricate series of sacrifices to get a single plumber to the exit.

Some levels can get excessively long, falling into that old puzzle platformer bugbear where you know what to do but fail at executing one of many steps, sending you back to the start of the level. Thankfully the game doesn’t require completion of every level to reach the end.

Apathy attempts to model what it feels like to be a single voter in a single district in an American-style representative democracy. You’re scored on how closely the unicameral legislature’s decisions on ten important bills mirror your character’s predetermined political views.

You see the representatives from a distance, through a wall of television screens. Their inner workings opaque.

The game leaves it up to the player to decide how politically active to be: voting on candidates, calling up your representative, calling friends in other districts to try and change their policy views or encourage them to follow your active example. It’s difficult to sustain the frenzied clicking pace needed to be fully engaged with the system, hoping that something eventually gets through to the representatives through each layer of indirection.

It’s hard to feel empowered under this system, but that’s the central paradox. An individual vote or call might not matter, but aggregate effects on large blocks of similar-minded voters can sway elections.

Given the current state of American politics this model, flawed as it already is, seems quaint, idealized. Every bill gets a vote. Representatives frequently break party lines. No one gets redistricted or purged from the voter rolls.

Donkey-Me is a solid retro remake themed around the first Indiana Jones film. It uses Donkey Kong as a base, but doesn’t adhere rigidly to the original’s design, giving greater emphasis to ladder-climbing enemies and introducing stationary snakes to trip up the incautious.

(Oh, look. Level one replaces the damsel in Donkey Kong with an inanimate golden idol and it’s no worse a game for it. It’s almost as if her role can be thought of as an empty placeholder within a system that treats her as an object for the hero to acquire. The other two level themes place Marion in that role, summarizing her involvement in the movie as someone who gets rescued twice.)

A homeless man awakens from a dream where people happily acknowledge his presence in a room filled with a surplus of collectible shiny baubles.. The waking world is less friendly. Kicked out of a temporary resting place, your goal is to scrounge up enough money to use an indoor toilet “for customers only.”

The game world evokes a modern setting, except teeming with Robot Bank Tellers. Automatons following their programming, absorbed by their tea, gawping at your monetary desperation, rigidly adherent to power structures that ask you to sacrifice what little you have for a chance at dignity.

Three half-remembered dreams turned into short game vignettes, made as part of the same daily game development ritual that brought us Octopus Decision. The focus is less on what actions the developer’s dream persona performed and more on the emotions evoked by the dreams.

In some dreams you may need to either move with the arrow keys or click on the narration to progress.

23 Comments

I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a twine game as much as Bell Park, Youth Detective in a long time – it perfectly captures the best parts of children’s detective novels on top of being an amusing and quite endearing portrayal of a 12 year old trying to be adult around adults as well. The twine format suits this kind of story really well in general, I suppose – I wish I’d been able to read detective novels with this sort of interaction when I was younger, really.

Thanks so much for featuring Apathy! I agree with what you’re saying about how idealized the model is, but I decided I didn’t want too many distractions from the central point. I actually cut a feature where a lobbyist would randomly throw money at a representative to influence their opinion, because that wasn’t an instance of the game mechanics themselves being the problem.

But if anyone would like to add some things to the game, it’s open source.

“Oh, look. Level one replaces the damsel in Donkey Kong with an inanimate golden idol and it’s no worse a game for it. It’s almost as if her role can be thought of as an empty placeholder within a system that treats her as an object for the hero to acquire.”

You could do the same with the avatar. They could all be coloured rectangles. It doesn’t matter. The point is to get the player to care what’s happening beyond a simple win/lose scenario, and that’s why we use identifiable characters.

Pretty much. Saving a character just makes for a more interesting story than saving an object. It’s unfortunate that the character to be saved has always been your girlfriend (nowadays games have us save our son or daughter, which might be better – it seems more evocative, at least). I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with putting a character on a game mechanic, though.

GladOS and Shodan are basically the level made into a character, in the way that Pauline’s the objective made into a character. Toriel from Undertale is the tutorial made into a character.

I might be crazy, but I feel like after an election where my representative lost my action group switched from wanting me to kill a bill to making it pass and I didn’t notice til after the vote. Very cool.